When I started drafting this post on April 11th, I wrote an intro explaining that my April wasn’t very exciting; it had been uneventful so far, and I expected that trend to continue throughout the rest of the month. I’m happy to say that I was wrong!

Eating plenty of delicious vegan food, especially the vegan satay at Dharma Kitchen in Jakarta. I also found a sushi place at the mall just down the road that does really cheap cucumber rolls. And I’ve continued to revisit a vegan noodle stall at another nearby mall.

Using my abundant downtime to learn some new skills (like Photoshop) and improve on some older ones (like Lightroom).

Seeing the new Avengers movie on opening night. I’M STILL NOT OKAY.

Writing and photography

My main mission these past few months has been to work on my writing and photography, and I would say that I accomplished both of those things! I’ve made a lot of progress with organizing years’ worth of photos, and if you’re reading this post, then you’ve probably been following along on here and have noticed that I’ve gotten into the habit of posting regularly on this site.

I’m really excited to be bringing this blog back to life. I think I mentioned in my last update that a huge part of my absence from this site has been the fact that teaching English made me feel really burnt out on writing.

Even before that, I was never great at posting consistently, and I think a huge part of that was that I was too disorganized; I couldn’t keep track of the photos that I took when I’d go somewhere cool, and I told myself I’d write a blog post about that experience after I got around to editing the photos, which usually didn’t happen.

Last year, I started to shoot my photos in RAW, which meant that I had to edit them, and that forced me to start organizing them. I got into a really good habit of editing the day’s photos within a day or two and then making sure they were filed on my hard drive and on my Flickr account. I then started working my way backward to organize past photos.

As I’ve gone through these older photos, it has brought up all of the memories of some great experiences, so I’ve been frantically writing posts while the (re)memory is still fresh.

Now that I’ve completed most of my photo organizing, I’ve turned my attention to learning more about photography, by way of youtube tutorials. I mostly knew how my camera worked, but now I feel like I know all the settings and features inside and out, and I know how to better choose settings and lenses based on what kind of photo I am trying to take.

I’ve also spent a lot of time this month planning the rest of my Asia adventure. While I haven’t been moving around much recently, that will change very soon. I’ll be revisiting Bali in a few weeks, and then I’ll be going to 2 new countries before flying back to the US from Hong Kong at the end of June.